Posts by Doctor Syntax

Venezuela loses president, but gains empty Starlink internet offer

Maybe it's for CIA assets in the country.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: RIP

Itanium was where it started going wrong.

Well respected? I'd go a step further: revered.

RIP

That was about the last remnant of the old HP. The HP that did things well.

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Re: Agile baby

But what happened to that bit of Agile that said "We value working software" or words to that effect?

Long forgotten, I suppose.

Re: What the hell

I suppose procurement were also scheme members. It will be a learning experience for them but, as I keep saying, experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Maybe other government procurement departments are also staffed by scheme members....

Fortunately I'm in the NICSP scheme.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

That's the way to do it. But "an email address" - just the one?

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

"And it took an astonishing long time before someone figured to check the log..."

Just cat from/dev/null to the relevant logs (use >, not >>), then shutdown.

Re: Neat trick

"I'd say the reactions have become LESS murderous with time in fact."

Disappointingly so.

OP should avoid reading Agatha Christie novels.

Trump admin sends heart emoji to commercial spyware makers with lifted Predator sanctions

It's an ill wind that blows no good.

I suppose a good few ministers might have had their data lifted in that heist. It should give them a keener interest in IT security.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Guns don’t kill people

US commentards have no idea how stupid that sort of argument sounds to those from civilised countries.

Re: What?

"If I drew a picture of a naked celebrity would that be considered illegal as well?"

If you have the artistic talent you could try your luck. To do that properly, of course, you wouldn't do that A/C. You might learn something about the difference between criminal and civil law.

Quite often existing laws, if enforced, would be applicable. I suppose nobody in law enforcement wants the task of running it up to the Supreme Court which might be necessary. Thus we end up with a welter of new legislation, dealing with narrower and narrower offences.

Re: Golden opportunity

The objection arises when the image purports to be of someone who has not consented. Purports in that the face is recognisably that person.

Bebu rightfully reminds us of the Golden Rule.

Re: Golden opportunity

"Hypocracy - rule by hypocrisy ?"

Excellent suggestion. It just about describes the US at present.

Re: Morals

I think if people started posting nudified images of Musk the guard rails would be applied PDQ. Or maybe they're already there but only apply to images of him.

Re: Consequences

One means of stopping things going wrong was to record the decisions in the Patent Rolls or Close Rolls. Archive.org will provide you with digitised copies of some of the publications of these made in the late C19th/early C20th (search for calendars and the name and regnal number of the king).

If you produced a forged charter with a forged seal on it something very nasty would happen to you. That's what could go wrong.

"a tweet or whatever you call it now"

Can we agree on Xcretion?

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

"continuing a product that costs more to maintain than the revenue it creates is unsustainable"

This is true, but this seems to have been done in a dog in a manger way. There are better alternatives.

There could, as another commentard has said, have been a final update that remove checking. That would have cost very little effort and given those who've paid over the years something permanent for their money. AIUI if they need to replace hardware - which they will at some point in time - they can't take it with them.

Source could have been placed in the public domain.

At the very least there could have been an apology to customers who have been dumped.

Re: Baudot/ASCII

"I used to pretend that I was listening to someone speaking with a particularly thick accent."

Interesting idea. Learn Morse so as to understand YouTube tutorials.

Re: In the raw

I suggest those who voted thumbs down to my OP copy and paste the above post into a serif font or even Comic Sans and then decide whether they should have thought more carefully.

Re: Open Source

It's one of my first resorts. A colleague in my local Civic Society creates a PDF for posters but wants it converted to JPEG for use on social media. Import into Gimp and export as JPEG. Job done (and answer No to saving as XCF).

Re: Open Source

What happens if you copy abd paste as text?

Re: In the raw

Comic Sans is OK. AriaI and the Iike are those which do not distinguish between capitaI l for lndia and Iower case I for Iima.

As a resuIt consider Al: is it short for ArtificiaI lntelIigence or the name AIlan? You have to copy and paste into something set to dispIay serif or a better sans serif font to teIl the difference.

GilI Sans throws in confusion with the number 1. l think at least one of the Johnson variants differentiates the Ietters but then confuses l for lndia with the number and some of them do differentiate. lt's an interesting exercise if you have muItiple fonts avaiIable to fire up your word processor, put the offending Ietters and numeraI together and see how many fonts give you three cIearIy differentiated gIyphs.

Re: In the raw

What about the fonts it uses to display. I'd like to think that Courier and Times New Roman survive and that the sooner Arial* dies a miserable death the better.

* and all sans-serif fonts like it

Re: A job for AI?

AI's job will probably be looking at the file and explaining almost what the format is. Alternatively it may be simply telling you it can't help because the bubble burst almost a century earlier.

Re: Should visit a

"serial terminals with various VT100, and the ones which came after had networked serial terminal servers for console access"

Do I know you?

Re: When I retire

"fixed format data structures"

A long while ago we had an accounts system which I'm pretty sure was written in COBOL although it was proprietary. It used C-ISAM as did the older versions of Informix and it would have been convenient to use it as look-up tables. On investigation it turned out that although there was a single data file it had multiple format records. The main "fixed" thing was the record length although I think there must have been some format indicator as well. AFAICR we CREATEed a table with the columns corresponding to the record type we wanted, deleted the files that that wrote and sym-linked in the data and index files from the accounts and accessed them with the WHERE clause picking out the appropriate records with whatever identified that format. In fact we might have repeated that for multiple format types.

Bitfinex crypto thief who was serving five years thanks Trump for early release

Re: I have come to ask you to do a service for me !!!

I can't help feeling that after Trump what's left of the US is going to have to do a lot of work on its constitution to ensure that checks and balances really work. It could also do with paying attention to its spelling system so that "checks and balances" isn't ambiguous.

Re: I have come to ask you to do a service for me !!!

Trump has his own crypto operation. Maybe he needs someone suitably talented to run it. Things could turn interesting.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Re: Metaphor vs Metaphysics !!!

Canute did not challenge reality. He challenged the sycophants around him. We sorely need a Canute right now.

Re: What a load of codswallop

"My employer pays for the 365 version of the chatbot and it's just as shit as the free one...so why the fsck is anyone in their right mind going to pay for it?"

So your employer is not in their right mine.

Observation shows that this is not unusual.

Re: Well he's a goner....

"it's wrong course"

And they're running it the wrong way round.

Re: Why is AI being pushed

"marketing geniuses"

Other epithets are available.

"he did not approve of the term"

All the more reason to use it. Obviously it's hitting home.

First, we must develop a "theory of mind" that treats AI as a tool that amplifies humans and products should be designed around this belief.

If that's the first thing to do why didn't he do that first?

It's a clear admission he has a solution (in the most generous interpretation of the word) looking for a problem.

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Re: "I did Ruby, and then Rust... so I needed to start with Ru"

Surely the better name for a programming language is Run. After all, that's what you want the programs to do.

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Re: strange idea

I suppose that allowing the orbits to decay a bit now they save fuel whilst that's happening and will then be able to use that to prolong their life in the lower orbit although they'll lose some life overall.

Or to put it in a single word: hubris.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Re: January 1, 2000

"and I suppose locked him up for the night to reflect on his decision"

If they'd let him get in first his reflections might have been deeper.

Although my clients' beancounters had opted to experience the MB (see my post in a previous thread) by postponing the planned mitigation until mid-January and as the plant was shut down over New Year SWMBO went to my cousin and his wife as usual for New Year. We went outside to view the spectacular collection of firework displays up and down the valley as seen from the top of their garden. It was an unforgettable spectacle. We later discovered that my daughter and her then partner just stayed in the pub and missed it all. What a miserable pair!

Wipe the foam from your mouth and then reflect on who was in government in 199/2000 and who was in government in 2020.

How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Re: I think he was too busy preventing other people stealing Microsoft innovation /s

Oh, look! Another one showing us they've no experience whatsoever of Linux.

For avoidance of doubt very few users compile their applications. They get binaries and upgrades from their distro or sometimes in my case that's Seamonkey and LibreOffice) from the application's own site.

One reason for this is that distros for regular users are based on long term support versions of the kernel so kernel revisions are minor. Another is that one of Linus' maxims is "don't break userland", userland being where applications run. A third is that application code uses a lot of standard libraries and the way Linux updates libraries is that this can almost invariably be done seamlessly.* IME (Devuan) what happens is that every few months there's a biggish update with a new kernel, a new version of the compiler and several libraries. As ever the upgrade is seamless and the only reason fro rebooting is to bring the new kernel into operation - at my convenience.

Also IME I have a few applications including the KDE Falkon browser which weren't in the distro and which I compiled from source. In Falkon's case was in February 2022. There have been several kernel updates since them and also updates of some of the QT libraries it uses but Falkon has not been recompiled. A few others are older.

* By this I mean that next time an application is run it automatically picks up the new library version. Services which are intended to run continuously are stopped and restarted so that they pick up the new version. If the service runs stateless this won't be noticed at all; if it doesn't then in theory it might be noticed, an RDBMS might be an example. This applies to new versions of server binaries. In practice I've only come across one service at such a low level that a reboot was necessary after installing a new version of a service. Even then there was no urgency as the old code remained in memory and running until the next reboot.

Re: I think he was too busy preventing other people stealing Microsoft innovation /s

My suspicion is that SCO was as much the target as Linux. At that time it held a strong position in small business servers. If it had really gone for a mass-market/price cutting strategy Linux would never have got off the ground in such situations but Microsoft would also have been threatened. The litigation kept them busy while Microsoft took over the server market. The support they got was peanuts compared to the value of keeping them tied up.

Re: I think he was too busy preventing other people stealing Microsoft innovation /s

The timing of the Jim Allchin memo is very interesting. The memo is 2002, the SCO suit started in 2003.

Re: Not just BillG but Balmer too…

"no fun for anyone involved"

Least of all for the customer. Food distribution is one of the most sensitive to delays and a computer system giving problems going to be very stressful for them. It might be small money to Microsoft but it would be big money to them.

Email to the CEO email address* can be effective.

One trick I've used in respect of a collapsing section of road was to send an** email to the CEOs of the local council and the utility addressing them jointly and suggesting they sort it out between themselves. I prevented them from than simply pointing at each other which they may well have done if I'd written separately to them or called their help-lines. It worked.

* ceoemail.com is your friend.

** Just the one email with two To: lines, no messing with BCCs so both knew the other had got the same email.

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

"I have this guy who is amazing and has been around forever, and AI for him is very valuable because he can see very quickly what is correct and what isn't correct"

So does he actually need the AI?

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Re: The real reason nobody wants to use it

"the way telephone networks pretty much solved the number space exhaustion problem over a century earlier.. just adding more numbers."

Attractive though this is as a solution, it isn't going to work. Telephone numbers are stand-alone sequences of digits. IP addresses are embedded in fixed length headers. If you extend an address it tramples over something else, either before or after it. The only way to handle it would be to have variable length headers, count the header length and then work out from that which bytes are address and which are other things. If the IPv4 had been specified in that way initially it would have been possible but the world is full of S/W stacks expecting fixed length which wouldn't survive the first batch of extended addresses.

European Space Agency hit again as cybercrims claim 200 GB data up for sale

Re: honest question

In this case it's not tens of billions of files; it's about the same size as my Downloads directory (maybe I should do some spring cleaning there).

On the whole I think the one-word answer to your question is "convenience". It trumps security every time. "Cost" probably comes a close second and "specialisation" a close third. Between them they ensure that it's cheaper to buy in facilities and those facilities are apt to be produced by specialists who have to rely on other specialists for components and they in turn ... you know how it goes.

That in turn produces what is euphemistically called a supply chain although supply tree would scarcely so it justice. The attack surface is immense. The complexity is probably unknown and, therefore, ensuring it's secured is virtually impossible because somewhere along the line it's likely that something couldn't be conveniently secured or maybe not even secured alone.